Posted on 09/05/2002 2:57:55 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
That's odd. I could have sworn I served there,and that I did a certain amount of studying the situation.
YOu have not read nor listened to what Johnson, and his advisors, said in his/their own words from 1963-1969. Read the transcripts.
I don't have to read the transcripts. I served in Viet Nam,and what LJB was doing was blindly obvious to Ray Charles. Do you REALLY think the military people serving in Viet Nam were so stupid they couldn't understand what was going on?
I was a college student in those days, perhaps you were not there.
You're right. I wasn't a college student until 1971. I was a soldier from 1964 to 1970.
I read book after book on Vietnam at the time. I went to every lecture of returning journalists and investigators, and veterans.
That's nice. Did you read about the US losing to the NVA during Tet of 1968? It was a terrible defeat. I believe it was in all the papers,and even Unlce Walter "the most trusted man in America" Cronkite was weeping and wailing about our terrible defeat.
students were even more educated on Vietnam than even the presidents own staff, who did not study Vietnam, and knew nothing about the vietnamese and their stuggle for independence for over 400 years.
The scarey part is that you probably really believe all that. South Viet Nam was ALREADY independent,and had been ever since the French were thrown out in 1954. It was North Vietnam that was a colony,and it was North Viet Nam that were the aggressors whose goal was to once again enslave the people of the south.
No one who knew anything about vietnam, ever supported the war over there, whether is was a military man, or not.
Excuse me,but are you trying to tell ME what the military men in VN thought about the war there,and that none of them supported it? Or is it that you think people like some of my friends who spent OVER 5 years there fighting the North Vietnamese Army didn't support our war efforts there?
Trouble is, it was mostly the anti-'s who ever bothered to learn anything about vietnam.
You need to go back to whoever taught you all this crap,and slap the piss out of them. You are woefully misinformed. The military has a term they call "Area Studies". Look it up. Many of my friends even went to the Army language school to learn how to speak Vietnamese,Cambodian,or Laotian. Some even learned some of the yard dialects.
The military was more interested in fighting among themselves, one branch of service against the other.
You really need to get out more. Interservice rivaliry has always existed,and it rarely interfers with the prosecution of the war. The biggest hinderances to our actions in VN were coming from the State Department.
, but other top generals did not want America to be there, and saw the futility of it.
This was both Monday Morning Quarterbacking once the war turned unpopular,and playing CYA at the same time. Its' "excuse-aflying" to try to cover their lack of competence and professionalism.
It had no strategic value, and the domino theory was already discredited by 1965.
Really? Have you ever tried to explain this concept to any of the Cambodians or Laotians who had their countries taken over by the communists? I'm sure they would be fascinated to hear your theories. Don't be surprised if they are just a touch skeptical,though.
the war was waged by civilians, the bombing targets were NOT selected by generals, but instead, were selected at the Tuesday Johnson lunches, by McNamarrra, Dirkson, etc. If you read the transcripts, the military was completely left out of all decision making prosesses.
Precisely the point I made in a earlier post. It was the fault of the senior military that they weren't involved. They shirked their duty and failed to follow their oaths. They had every right to DEMAND they be included in the planning,and a OBLIGATION to resign in disgust and call a news conference if their input were ignored. They had the power all along to make LJB listen to them,but they put career ahead of duty,and failed as soldiers.
I am talking about combat missions, by americans, up the mekong river, and in other places, which secretly bombed and killed.
There WAS no secret bombing. The "secrecy" was a polite fiction,maintained by the NVA,the governents of Cambodia and Laos,the VN government,and the US government. You need to start reading books by people who know what the hell they are talking about,instead of the media theorists who never left Saigon.
Those missions were officially secret until the 1990's,
I think they became unclassified in the 1980's,but this is just a minor detail. They were widely known about even during the 60's.
although the vietnamese complained about them in the early 1960's.
No,they didn't. They didn't because they couldn't. The North Vietnamese STILL won't admit they had troops in South Viet Nam during the war. They couldn't very well complain abotu us bombing them in their sancutaries in Cambodia and Laos because they denied they were there. Just like the governents of Cambodia and Laos denied they were there. If they weren't there,how could we have been bombing them?
And before you start complaining again that I don't know what I am talking about,I was one of the people running those secret combat missions.
It is now a fact that Vietnam DID go communist in 1974, and all of southeast asia did NOT fall since then, as was predicted by the domino theorists.And the naysayers back in 1965 predicted the demise of the Soviet Union as a result of our staying out of Vietnam?
I would also recommend "Dereliction of Duty" because the author had access to recently declassified documents at the LBJ Library. Frankly, I think it's a mistake to rely too heavily on the LBJ tapes, because he was a duplicitous sob, which is one reason he was so good at Senate politics. But the documents tell much the same story Halberstam ferreted out. McNamara and Taylor did most of LBJ's dirty work in forcing the Chiefs to revise their original analysis of troop strength needed to defeat the communists and McNamara enforced the "hold until November" strategy of lying to the American people during the 1964 election. IMHO LBJ's statements on tape asking McNamara for an assessment before the election were just a set-up so LBJ could claim after the election he didn't know the Vietnam situation had deteriorated so badly that US troops were needed and thus deny he misled the electorate in 1964.
Amen!!
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